


Alone at Night, Scared of What Might Be

by Ceose



Series: The Soulmates of Hawkins [2]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Introspection, M/M, Some angst, Steve is sad, soul marks, soul mates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 17:22:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17187188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ceose/pseuds/Ceose
Summary: Steve is one before his mark shows up.





	Alone at Night, Scared of What Might Be

**Author's Note:**

> This is Steve's version of [The Undertow](https://archiveofourown.org./works/15765012).
> 
> Still technically not beta read but I did make my BFF read over it and point out mistakes. If you see anything that I need to fix let me know.

Steve is born so quiet that his doctor's do actually slap him a few times to get a cry out. He just gives soft hiccups and turns wet eyes towards the nurse. They send him out for tests and it's a few hours before he's safely back in his mother’s arms being held for the first time. The nurse tells his parents that they're lucky, “He’s perfect,” she tells them. Holding him out to his mom like a gift. They spend the day listening to the baby in the other room crying while their son just lays in the crib soft and content. He doesn't have a soul mark. His body free of someone else for now. When he’s older his mom tells him that she was happy for the first twelve months after his birth when he was free of marks and only hers. That before she saw the start of his soul mate’s words inking themselves into him he was content and lovable and beautiful. Then he wasn’t. When Steve is alone at night watching for monsters outside in the dark he wonders if she’s using the words on his head as an excuse; he thinks she is. He thinks it’s convenient. 

His parents are well prepared for their son’s arrival. They have the nursery ready, the nanny ready. His mom had said over and over that she was going to breastfeed because she heard it was really for the best, but in the end it was easier to let the nanny feed him late at night with formula. Eventually he would refuse anything but the nanny and formula. Eventually he would be happier when he was being held by anyone else. Steve is born late at night and until he turns one he is the baby everyone dreams of having. His mom keeps hats on his head because he rubs all his hair off on the left side. He won’t stay still, he won’t stop looking for something; for someone. His mom tells him, when she’s home, “I’m here my sweet boy, I’m here,” but he looks at her and through her like she’s the wrong person.

Then he turns one. Then a few days, weeks, months after that his head starts to show words leaking through the patches where his hair is regrowing. He goes from being soft and quiet to crying all day, all night. Non stop, his tears turning his face red. He holds his head like it hurts him and his mom takes him to his doctor but there’s nothing wrong. There’s nothing that should be making him hurt like he is. He cries for a month and then, clear as day, his nanny brings him into the dining room where his parents are eating and through the patchy hair on the side of his head the words ‘pretty boy’ are scrawled. Huge swooping letters that no girl would ever use. They take up almost the whole side of his head, like whoever they belong to wanted everyone to know that they were Steve’s soulmate and no one else. After that though he’s back to being the lovable boy he was before. He’s back to being his mom’s sweet boy.

They still leave the next morning. Early in the dawn before Steve even wakes up, before his nanny gets up to prepare herself for the day. They’re gone for three weeks and when they come home Steve is calling the nanny ‘momma’ and cries for hours after they let her go. His mom tells him that she’ll be around more, prompts him to call her ‘momma’ but when he does it’s sullen and forced out. They hire a new nanny and decide to take Steve with them on more trips. He goes to Italy, France, England, New York, California, Georgia. He goes to so many places and then he turns five and starts kindergarten. He goes home, his parents stay in Ireland.  
Steve goes to school and everyone asks about soul marks but his are covered by dark brown hair and his mom was always telling him that you don’t share your mark with anyone other than the person that put them there. She tells him that no one will love him like his soul mate does. No one will understand him like they do. Steve grows up and his hair grows longer and thicker and then, one day, he stops thinking about the marks that are hidden and starts thinking about girls. One girl, in particular, with dark hair and delicate features. A girl with a camera burned into her thigh she never wants to talk about. Until suddenly it’s all they _can_ talk about because he got her best friend killed and there’s monsters and the only time he feels safe is when he’s holding a bat studded with nails.

He keeps it hidden under his bed when his parents are home, in his hand when they aren’t. He lays in bed with it next to him like a lover because he can’t sleep anymore. He wakes up to the smell of rot and mold and he walks the house at night looking out the windows waiting to see more demodogs coming to finish what was started. His mom comes home for two days one month after the gate has been closed for what they thought was the first and last time. Steve is sitting in the living room because it's midnight, every light in the house is on and he's watching the back windows like if he turns away from it he’ll die. His mom walks in and wonders what happened to her sweet boy. She stops in the doorway and just looks at him; her Steven, her pride and joy. He jumps three feet when she calls his name, a bat in his hand and his eyes so wide they're black. She leaves him there, alone in a house with no dark corners. She doesn't know what to do, what to say. Steve watches her go and doesn't miss her once she's gone. He can't remember when he ever did miss her. 

He spends Christmas with Nancy and her family, New Years with the kids in a basement watching them play games and argue over things that he doesn't understand and doesn't care about. Nancy invites Jonathan and the three of them go outside at midnight and huddle together in the cold while the boys run around shouting. It's the most animated he's seen Will in months, the most he's felt in what's starting to feel like years. He can see Jonathan’s mark peeking out of his jacket when he looks up at the sky; the face of a colorful spider, the obvious artwork from a children’s book. Steve knows the book; he gave Nancy a first edition copy for Christmas, a gift she said was more than she deserved. A gift he insisted she had to have; the book her grandmother would read to her as a toddler. Her favorite book from her childhood, a book wrapped up in warm memories and happiness. Steve needed her to have that. He needed her to have something that would make her smile and feel warm inside. 

Steve knows she isn't his soul mate, just like she knows he isn't hers. They don't talk about their marks. When it's late at night and he's under the covers of his bed, her legs hiding the light of his bedroom he pretends like the toy camera isn't there printed on her thigh like a joke he doesn't understand. He passes his hand in the air above it and around it but never, _never_ touches it. He does his best to never look at it or think about it. He does his best to make her forget it, make himself forget it. He never does. He knows she never does either. 

The pass through the first of the year, the summer, and the start of the school year coasting on what was and not what is. They have dinner with Barb’s parents at first once a month, then every two weeks, then every week. He sees them more than his own parents. He can feel the cracks between Nancy starting to widen, the gap becoming bigger. She wears shorts at his house one sunny day and the camera peeks out at him, taunting him, mocking him. She goes home later and he stares at himself in the bathroom mirror, the spot on his head where his soul mark hides. It's the last night of summer; his senior year starts the next day. He's not ready. He doesn't think he’ll ever be ready for anything ever again. 

School starts and he roams the halls with Nancy and Jonathan while his old friends stand inches, feet, miles apart from him and he knows they talk about him and they wonder what he’s doing. Why he’s doing it. He can’t explain it to them, what is he suppose to say when he doesn’t even know what he’s doing anymore. He knows that Nancy isn’t where he’s meant to be but he doesn’t even remember what his soul mark looks like. He doesn’t know where he’s going to go after the school day, much less once school ends. He does know where Nancy is going to end up eventually no matter how much he loves her or supports her or goes to dinner with the parents of a dead girl. So he just keeps doing what seems to be working and hoping that when she leaves him he’ll be okay. Even though he knows he won’t be. Knowing everyone leaves you doesn’t mean that when it happens it hurts less. Sometimes Steve thinks that his mom lied to him about having a soul mark, that he’s destined to be left by everyone because there’s always going to be something, _someone_ , better waiting for them once they decide they want it. Once they decide he’s not worth it.

Then the new kid starts school and, thankfully, it’s all Steve hears about so it means he’s not the focus anymore. Except the new kid is this huge shape that Steve can’t avoid seeing everywhere he goes. His face a constant smirk and he walks through the hallways of the school like he owns it. Which, maybe he does. If the high school needs a king they don’t have one in Steve anymore. He’s glad that they found someone else to look up at instead of staring at him and trying to will him back into the fold. Steve saw so much last winter that high school seems like a waste of time, life seems like a waste of time. He doesn’t care about anything anymore. He thinks he still cares about Nancy, but sometimes when it’s late and the shadows are moving around the edges of his house and he thinks he can hear Barb yelling he thinks maybe he just doesn't. Maybe he’s just holding on to her, holding her back, because he’s scared. 

It’s almost a relief when the party happens and Nancy finally lets out all the bottled up anger she’s been holding inside herself. It hurts, it hurts so much when he realizes that she’s not in love with him even though he knows he was never where she was meant to be. He thinks that maybe she never loved him at all; that she was avoiding what the camera on the inside of her leg means and he’s been avoiding the blank canvas on his entire body. He leaves there and watches Jonathan take her out of the house. He can feel the grip he’s been using to keep Nancy with him slipping. He waits until they leave to make his way out to his car. He passes the new guy, Billy, on his way out. He can feel the thud of his heart against his ribs as he walks past him. He feels like he should be scared of something, he feels like he should be running from something, but the other boy just watches him walk away. Steve doesn’t know what the look in his eyes means. He thinks he should be scared of him but he’s not. He doesn’t know what he is, but he’s not scared of him. Steve knows what a monster looks like in the dark and that’s not what he is. 

Eventually, like all the things in Steve’s life, it goes to shit. He tries to apologize to Nancy about Halloween but she’s gone. She’s gone and Jonathan is gone and Steve knows that he was never going to make it into the car with her as she drove off because any mark he had put on her was never permanent. That toy camera on her thigh was always where she was headed. Steve’s okay though, or at least he hopes that if he says it enough he will be. There’s not many other options for him though because Dustin needs him, the kids need him. There’s more monsters out in the woods than before and he ends up in a junkyard with three kids he barely knows fighting these creatures he will have nightmares about for the rest of his life. But it’s okay. They’re okay. He hopes that if he says it enough it’ll actually be true.

Steve spends the next few days ignoring the new kid at school that seems to be everywhere now. In gym, in the locker room, at lunch. Always watching him, always there. Every time Steve sees him his head hurts where his mark is. He tries to remember what he’s been taught about soul marks but really he doesn’t care. There’s more to life than soul mates; he wakes up every night terrified of what’s out there. He doesn’t have time for anything else really. 

After the fight, after the tunnel, after _everything_ Joyce and Hopper take Steve to the hospital and they shave his head. Steve can hear his mom in his head crying about his hair being gone, crying about his face being beat up. She’s not there though. She calls from the airport in England right before she boards a plane headed to Japan and asks him how he is. He lies so when she tells him she can’t come home it doesn’t hurt. He’s not sure if he’s trying to keep it from hurting him or her. In the end it doesn’t matter; the nurse shaves the side of his head and there, taking up more space than it really has any right to, are the words ‘pretty boy’. Steve doesn’t recognize the handwriting at first but he knows the words. The doctor sewing up the cut on his head tells him it’s a shame that his mark will have a scar in it. He offers to send in a plastic surgeon to see if anything can be done about it. Steve thanks him but says no. The more he looks as the mark, the more he sees it, he knows who it belongs to. He wonders what it is that makes him and Billy perfect for each other. 

Steve misses more school than he can really afford to miss and goes back to school with a bandage on the side of his head. He can hear the whispers in the hall as he passes by. He and the gang all keep quiet about what exactly happened. Steve knows that eventually his soul mark will be out and everyone will see it; he doesn’t want people to think that Billy is one of those low life guys that hits their soulmate. He thinks, when he tries to focus on that night and on Billy’s face that he wasn’t the one Billy was looking at when his fists were flying. There’s so much anger in Billy that Steve isn’t sure how no one has been burned by it yet really.

Maybe Steve is perfect for Billy because he’s nothing but fear and worry curled up inside his stomach so much that he can’t sleep at night without all the lights on. Maybe he’s the person that Billy needs all that fire to protect. Steve’s parents say they care but never show it unless it’s by throwing empty words or money at him. If there’s one thing Steve has learned about Billy is that when he cares about something he’s all in, no looking back. 

If there’s one thing being with Nancy has taught him it’s that eventually all the soulmarks lead home. For all that his parents have one of the nicest houses in town and he never has to worry about anything money related Steve has spent almost his whole life trying to find someone that would not leave him. Steve has spent his whole life trying to find his home. Maybe that home is Billy. He goes to bed and tries to think about what he’s going to say when he finally sees Billy without the bandage. He goes to bed and knows that the next morning he’ll go to school without anything hiding his head from prying eyes. 

He doesn't know what will happen but he's tired of being alone at night scared of what might be out there. Maybe now he can have someone standing next to him that wants to be there. Maybe now he can see what his mom meant when she left him all those times following behind his dad like the sparrow she had marked him with. Maybe now he can have something that's just his. He goes to sleep that night and he dreams of a future where he's never alone.

**Author's Note:**

> [The page that helped me decide what mark Steve's mom put on his father.](https://mydreamsymbolism.com/sparrow-spirit-animal-totem-symbolism-and-meaning)
> 
> [The book that Steve buys Nancy and where Jonathan's mark is from.](https://m.barnesandnoble.com/p/anansi-the-spider-gerald-mcdermott/1024599200/2688649818804?st=PLA&sid=BNB_Core+Catch-All,+Low&sourceId=PLAGoNA&dpid=tdtve346c&2sid=Google_m&gclid=EAIaIQobChMImM3F5NTA3wIVh8DICh3dgQ8xEAQYASABEgIlLfD_BwE)
> 
>  [The camera that Nancy's mark is. Hopefully this link will last a while. But it's the 1972 Mattel Chatter Pall Pull String Toy Camera.](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-1972-Mattel-Chatter-Pall-Pull-String-Toy-Camera-/183148443254)
> 
> Sorry there's still no kissing. Or maybe I'm not. Who knows.


End file.
